Nancy D. Brown is a lover of all things related to travel. With What A Trip, she has combined her passion for travel with her professional writing career. 
Is Blogging Lazy Person’s Journalism?
Monday September 1, 2008 at 11:11 PM | 15 Comments
Posted by Nancy D. Brown
Is blogging the lazy person's journalism? As a freelance writer and blogger, my answer to this question is no. I take as much time writing a blog post as I do writing a newspaper article. An editor for Wine Spectator magazine recently posted to their online forum that blogging is a lazy person's journalism. Here is what I had to say about that subject at OpenWine Consortium.
"This is the problem with the 'blogosphere'," according to Wine Spectator Senior Editor James Molesworth. "It's a lazy person's journalism. No one does any real research, but rather they just slap some hyperlinks up and throw a little conjecture at the wall, and presto! you get some hits and traffic."
Admittedly, Molesworth was licking his wounds on the August 20, 2008 Wine Spectator online forum after the trade magazine gave an “Award of Excellence” to a non-existent restaurant in Milan, Italy. Wine writer Robin Goldstein entered Osteria L’Intrepido and its fake menu in the magazine’s restaurant awards competition, paying the $250 entry fee, as part of the research for an academic paper Goldstein was working on about standards for wine awards.
Wine Spectator Executive Editor Thomas Mathews called the hoax an act of malicious duplicity and defended the magazine's reputation stating, "we do not claim to visit every restaurant in our awards program."
Perhaps the Wine Spectator's public relations department should be in touch with "Do Travel Writer's Go To Hell" author Thomas Kohnstamm. Kohnstamm referenced his lack of actual fact checking for some of his Lonely Planet guidebooks and was skewered in the travel blogging and writing community.
It's seems ironic to me that Molesworth is labeling bloggers as lazy journalists, stating that "no one does any real research," while his own magazine awarded a non-existent restaurant with a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence. Perhaps people who work in glass cubicles should not be casting stones upon the blogging community?
I'll be attending the Wine Bloggers Conference on October 24-26 in Sonoma County, California. One of the purposes of the conference is to bring together wine bloggers, new media innovators and wine industry leaders to share experiences and lessons learned.
Photo by rhettmaxwell via Flickr (creative commons.)
